The Joy of Internet Radio

Internet radio is great. Scanning through Live365 and looking at the Christian stations, there is something for everyone – no matter how narrow the musical tastes. Classic Christian is a niche radio format and it just wouldn’t fly as a regular radio station. But, as an internet radio station, it survives and does quite well. Internet radio has a worldwide reach so our listeners come from all over. In the past 30 days,  we have had listeners from Canada, Bulgaria, Mexico, India, Philippines, China, Colombia, Finland, Bahamas (cool), Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, UK, Croatia, Brazil, New Zealand, Mauritius, Qatar, Chile, Barbados, and a lot of others. Amazing!

As niche as Classic Christian is by itself, there are many stations on Live365 that play a form of it – like:
Classic Christian Rock – “classicchristianrock.net”, “CCMRewind.com”
Classic Christian “Deep Cuts” – “higherpowerrock.com”
Classic Christian music like what we play here – “ClassicChristianHits.com”, “ccmclassics.com”, “jesusmusicoldies.com”, “ccmflashback.com”, “streetsofgoldradio.com”.

It’s good to have that kind of variety even for a format like Classic Christian! Classic Christian Hits has been the #1 Live365 station of its type on/off for a while now – but some of the other stations have music I don’t have and sound really good. Sometimes I like to just flip around on the Live365 dial and hear what others are doing.

Yeah, internet radio is pretty amazing. For me, it’s been a real blessing.

What’s A Classic Christian Hit?

In the early days of CCM, there weren’t what we know now as traditional music ratings. CCM Magazine was the first to try to compile radio popularity of Contemporary Christian Music. They had select stations they used and derived their totals from those stations. Unfortunately, there weren’t many “all music” CCM stations – so some of the song popularity came from music shows or the limited times when music was played (like at night). The other programming of those stations often was Bible teaching and possibly other forms of Christian Music (i.e. The Gaither’s).

Billboard magazine eventually started to survey CCM stations – but many of those were also “part time” CCM stations and music shows.

To compound the problem, there wasn’t the amount of Christian music that there is now. Radio stations who wanted to be full-time playing CCM, often had trouble finding enough music to play. That resulted in stations adding music a lot faster than the labels would release the songs (or selecting album cuts that were never officially released). Because of this, the labels didn’t have complete control on when a song (or what song) was “released”. That also impacted the charts because while the same songs may have been played off an album, they were played on different radio stations at different times of the year.

Any compiled list of charts that we find now for early CCM (70′s and 80′s), isn’t entirely accurate. But, it’s the best we have.

What kind of Christian music radio station did you have in your area when growing up? I’d love to hear your stories.

What’s New?

Some of the updates you will hear include a change out of songs from Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Petra, Russ Taff, Imperials, and a few other gems I’ve found recently.

02.12.11: Have you ever said,  “disco” and “The Bill Gaither Trio” in the same sentence? Chances are you haven’t except to say, “The Bill Gaither Trio was anything but disco music”. But, if you were tuned into CCM radio in the late 70′s, there’s a chance you could have heard a disco song the Gaither Trio released. Yep, the Gaithers. They got caught up in the disco fever of the time and released, “We Are Persuaded”.  Over my better judgment, I have added it to the rotation.    It’s from 1979 and good luck finding it on the Gaither homepage. I think they would rather forget about the album and song. Actually, most of the album sounds like the traditional Gaither Trio but there are two songs that were disco oriented. “We Are Persuaded” was added today. I’ve also added two songs from Kelly Willard – “Blame It on The One I Love” & “A Friend So True”.